The holy everyday

the goodness we don't always talk about

So often when I’m catching up with my mama friends, we end up talking about what’s hard. How that molar kept our toddler up all night. Or the trouble our eldest is having at school. Or how our entire family got sick with a stomach bug that week.

It’s important to have a space to talk about these things. Necessary, even.

Parenthood is such an all-encompassing experience, it can often feel lonely. And, in a very real way, it is…because you’re mostly doing it alone.

We need to be able to share the hardship with others, to have them orient with us towards just how big the challenge is, because our bodies and psyches know it’s not meant to be like this.

Our soma yearns for a time when we were just one of a whole network of caretakers. When our community literally revolved around supporting new humans to grow—and everyone was responsible for creating safety, nurturance, and support.

We need to share the exhaustion and worry and desperation, because it’s a load we’re simply not meant to bear alone. And our systems know that sharing it is essential to our own wholeness.

But I notice, when I rush in with the hard stuff (asking always, in a subconscious way, to have my own needs be met, to be held, to be seen, to create community once more)…that I often leave out all incredible stuff. The awe. The wonder. The holy everyday.

I have a friend who is from Eastern Europe. In her family it’s almost considered bad luck to talk about the good things in your life. It took me a while to realize that she wasn’t trying to rain on my parade every time I told her about something exciting in my life and she responded negatively— she was trying to protect me. Coming from an area of the world that has seen so much continual hardship and challenge, this is how she learned to protect the fragility of good fortune. To shelter what is miraculous. To safeguard one another and what is vulnerable.

I think about this often as me and my mama friends shy away from sharing the wonder. I think it’s partially that we don’t need people to orient with us towards the joy in the same way that we need people to orient with us towards the hardship. But there’s streaks of other things as well. Superstitiousness. Feeling silly about our domestic joy. Not wanting to burden others with details that are seemingly commonplace but that, to you, feel like miracles.

But we need to share the holy everyday too. Because this is the stuff that humanity’s own holiness is made of.

As I was writing this piece one of my dearest friends called me on the phone. It’s always hard for us to catch each other, so I took a break from writing to chat. We talked about all the big things in our life, the stuff we were both tired of shouldering on our own. Then, towards the end of the conversation, once we both felt the spaciousness of having gotten so much off our chests, the conversation turned.

And suddenly we were talking about her toddler’s curls.

Not just the fact that he has them (and none of her three other children did) but how (holy cuteness) they bounce when he walks. And how, when she was out for a stroll around the neighborhood the other day, in-between worrying about all the huge and hard things of life, she just walked behind him for a while, watching the curls bounce and thinking to herself… “it’s all worth it.”

And while she told me this I was nodding vigorously, thinking to my own self “Yes, this is holy. Yes, this is a miracle. Yes, this is what makes it all worthwhile”

Because, yes, sometimes I’m so under-stimulated I feel like I could lay on the ground and my body would bore a hole into the earth. And yes, sometimes I’m so over-stimulated I feel like I could burst into spontaneous flames.

But in-between moments like these, are everyday miracles that regularly make me weep.

Recently my daughter has been having an explosion of vocabulary. It’s almost as if she’s been squirreling words away for the past 18 months and now suddenly, she’s brought out the entire collection to string together into a rosary of thought.

Every day she surprises me with something new.

Yesterday she laid on her back on the porch, pointed up into the trees, which were undulating in a gentle wind, and said “wow.”

Or last evening when she patted the water in her tub and said “Mama, in!” because she wanted me to be with her. And how, when I did, she held her arms up over her head and exclaimed “Yay!”

Or the other night, when she was nursing in the dark and stopped suddenly to nuzzle into my body and say… “home”.

These moments are so commonplace. So wonderful. So miraculous. So ordinary.

They are the holy everyday. They literally happen all the time, and yet they are the sunbreaks that make it all possible.

They are a shaft of light on the green of a hill after rain. The first flower opening in the meadow. They are the last duckling in the row, following their mother between the reeds. They are the gem simply falling from the face of a stone. No chiseling, no digging, no faceting necessary.

These moments fall to you, whole and entire, and are precious beyond measure.

So now, when my mama friends and I get together and unload, even if we don’t have enough time to say everything, even if we never reach the end of a conversation where we can talk about toddler curls… I know it’s there.

I know that their days are as equally fully of sun strikes and first flowers and entire gemstones. I know that they are experiencing something wholly miraculous, just as I am, and that the visitation of such holiness happens every day.

And I know that just for being together, we help each other make the space again to go home and witness them.

Because that’s the thing about every registered miracle on earth—each one had to be witnessed.

So we gather together, we resource, we share the hardships…and we go home to become witnesses to the miracle.

Of our child growing. Of a person becoming.

Of the holiness, the everyday holiness, that is everywhere.